It's here! It's here it's here IT'S HERE!!!!!

My new favorite sweatshirt has arrived! WAH!

Ya wanna know what it says?

Yes you do, don't lie.

Liar.

It says: And then Buffy staked Edward. The end.

I will model it in a few anti twilight pictures for you guys to see!

Until then, over and out...

I can't wait! I absolutely love Halloween, and all those lovely specials are coming on T.V. now... YAY!!!!!

I plan on doing a special Halloween piece for you guys (that will probably be late) and I might actually color it and actually give it a background. I'm just not sure what I'll do... hmm... I'd love some suggestions!

I just love Halloween, it's my absolute favorite season, including Christmas. The costmes, the creatures, the myth. Do you know the actual point of All Hallows Eve? It was a Druid (Gaelic? Well, that general areA) ceremony where the people would dress up as creatures to confuse the evil spirits. There was more significance to it, but I'd rather not ruin the details. 'Cuz I don't remember them all...

Anyways, Halloween... I can't wait! Unfortunately I'm too old for trick or treating (according to Mom, I'm not inclines to agree) so me and Mom have started a tradition of settling down and watching spooky movies all night. Some years there's a Tales from the Crypt marathon om Chiller, and we watch that instead. It's just as good, sometimes better.

I CAN'T WAIT!!!!

Another note:

Due to the popularity of my rant (see previous journal) I'm putting the essay on hold. Sounds backwards right? No. I'm waiting until summer time to work on it so I canput my full concentration on it. I want this to be a good piece, something SMeyer should have considered when she was writing her crap books.

I hope you guys don't mind the extra long wait!

This:

"I strongly disagree with you. First of all, I’m wary to believe that you actually read all the books completely; many of your facts are wrong. For instance, it was explained that the vampires only went to high school to blend into the human town. It was the only way they could live there without their secret being discovered. Of course it wasn’t the first thing teenagers would do, because… they aren’t really teenagers. In fact some of them are hundreds of years old. I’m sure they don’t have the mindset of your average teen. They’re old souls in a teenage body, if you will. They didn’t want to go to high school, it was the only way they could survive.

The books also explained that the family of vampires had only lived in Forks for about two years. People WOULD notice that they never aged, which is the reason that the family never stays in one place for long. They are constantly moving to avoid humans finding out their secret.

Not thinking things through and following instincts DOES NOT make someone stupid. ‘Stupid’ is someone who is not smart. Bella’s character follows her heart, and does what she thinks is best. Sometimes she may not make the best choices. But she is a teenage girl. That’s just the way her character is. I don’t understand how that makes the story “suck”.

Stephenie Meyer’s story is just that. It’s a STORY. Don’t pick it apart and flip things around to make them seem like something they’re not. It only shows that you didn’t read very carefully. It’s fiction. Like the books (or not# for what they are, and leave it at that."

was the defense and rebuttal agains this:

"Okay, I’ll say it: I hate Twilight.

For those of you who aren’t regularly around teenagers, you might have seen this book cover on your way through Borders or Barnes and Noble:

{Picture of Twilight Cover}

Twilight is a publishing phenomenon, to say the least — it’s sold something over 3.5 million copies, even muscling out Harry Potter on some lists, if memory serves, and is responsible for -among other things- one of my first-period students writing “I Heart Edward Cullen” all over her notebook.

The first thirty pages of the novel had me somewhat intrigued: a young teenage girl from Phoenix moves to rainy Forks, Washington to be with her estranged father. There, she starts high school and immediately encounters a brooding, mysterious group of students whose strangeness seems to have the air of another world, or at least an older time. In that respect, it initially reminded me of the relationship between the outsider Richard and the élite Greek scholars of Donna Tartt’s obsessive and weirdly fascinating novel The Secret History .

Suffice it to say that the bloom started to come off the rose fairly swiftly after about page 30, and there were more than four hundred pages to go. Let’s start with the main character, shall we?

I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t remember the heroine’s name even though I was well into the book and I had to check back a few pages to see whom I was reading about. The name, by the way, is Isabella Swan, a moniker that seemed more suited to a trashy Bertrice Small-type romance than a young adult novel, but I was willing to go along with the ride — hey, I’ve enjoyed novels with protagonists named Amber St. Claire – but to my annoyance, the heroine seemed to be barely more than a blank page. As some reviewers for Amazon noticed, this character vacancy is probably a chief reason for the novel’s popularity, for how better to project one’s own fantasies than onto a blank screen? What passes for characterization is Meyer’s description of Bella as one of those faux-naive types existing nowhere except in trashy romances — the type who seemingly has no idea she’s attractive even though she could walk on a carpet of dropped male tongues on her way to biology class. Instantly upon her arrival in not-so-sunny Forks, she’s surrounded by a circle of cutouts from Central Casting: the goofy, chatty girlfriend, the nice-but-a-loser would-be suitor, the clueless dad who seems like a cross between Sheriff Andy Taylor and Gomer Pyle, and -of course- the mysterious Edward.

The mysterious Edward’s mystery is that he’s a vampire. Oh, and he’s gorgeous. His amber eyes occasionally glare, occasionally gleam, and are occasionally onyx. He’s a genius and does everything with precision and perfection. He is far more sophisticated and street-smart than the heroine, and makes his knowledge known in a world-weary tone that does great credit to the writers of the Cliffs Notes for The Picture of Dorian Gray. He’s gorgeous, and he drives a Volvo, and his house contains a lovely collection of antiques, including his family members. Oh, and in case you forgot, he’s gorgeous.

Meyer bends over backward – really, the woman does a whole Pilates class – to sidestep what we can call Vampire Ethics 101. As other readers such as Amazon’s Gaimangirl have observed, Mayer eschews ethical complexity throughout. For all of the strained and cringeworthy moments in Interview With the Vampire or its sequele a vampire in a rock band? Ow… at least Anne Rice spent thought and time presenting a diverse array of approaches to the moral conundrum of being a vampire, whether it was the rich joy of human predation practiced by the decadent Lestat or the torturous, Catholic self-hatred of Louis in that same novel. Compared to Stephanie Meyer, Anne Rice looks like Kierkegaard. Meyer’s approach is to present the issue perfunctorily and deal with it in a joke: Edward and his vampire family are, he laughs, “vegetarians,” which means they prey only on animals. Oh, and since they don’t use weapons to hunt those animals, they’re not even violating hunting statutes.

Yeah, because vampires in this novel aren’t scared of garlic or crosses, but the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife puts the fear o’ Jesus into them.

So many elements in this novel simply fail to make any kind of sense even on the novel’s own terms. Hey, I’ll suspend my disbelief for a good novel: I’ll willingly accept that King Arthur’s nemesis Morgaine was a pagan priestess; I’ll accept that a whale can become invested with all the symbolic resonance of sperm, sex, death, and obsession; and I’ll even accept a road trip novel starring a chubby alien named J. Lo and a girl named Gratuity.

What I can’t accept is that a vampire has any kind of interest in going to high school. Really, isn’t that one of the first things that every teenager would do if they were a vampire? Is she serious? Like, “I’m undead and have eternal life, but I don’t want to settle for a GED”?

What I also can’t accept is that the author did NOTHING with this premise. I can only imagine what the authors of the ironically self-mocking show Supernatural would’ve done with the idea of a high school vampire in an AP U.S. History class:

Vampire Student: “Well, actually, Mr. Smith, there was a lot of uncertainty in the U.S.A in 1945 about whether hitting Hiroshima with the atom bomb was the right course of action…”

AP Teacher: “And you know this how, Mr. Cullen?”

Vampire Student: “Uh…call me a living history fan.”

Mayer never really explores the logic of her own premise, that this family of vampires has settled in on the rainy Olympic Peninsula to live in a town of three thousand people. Even the inhabitants of a hypothetical small town populated only by incredible idiots, all of whom were eternally distracted by a supply of free cable TV showing nothing but porn and Hannah Montana, would tend to notice little things like the fact that one’s kids never really grow up and just keep going to high school, or that that nice Dr. Cullen got his medical degree from Cambridge… in the 1600s.

At the risk of being dogpiled by an angry, torch-carrying mob of Meyer fans, if Twilight were just this bad, it could be laughed off as the silly, ill-written trash it is.

Regrettably, it’s more than a novel: it’s a teenage phenomenon, but too many teenage readers tend to regard the novel with what can kindly be called an utter lack of critical distance. One Amazon reviewer, “Sara Nightingale,” hotly rebutted an accusation that Bella’s actions were “stupid” by saying, “Bella isn’t stupid; she just doesn’t always think things through and tends to follow her instincts.”

Um, Sara…isn’t that what stupid means?

The lack of critical distance is more than laughable, though. When this relationship between Bella and Edward becomes regarded as the perfect romance — and it has; there are Vampire Romance Clubs apparently forming in honor of this book – it starts to become dangerous.

Let’s never lose sight of something really crucial, folks: Edward is gorgeous, Edward is sexy, Edward has amber-or-is-it-onyx eyes, and Edward has skin that sparkles like he’s covered with cheap glitter lotion if you put him in the sunlight.

But more important than all things, Edward is a killer.

Whether he’s a killer of animals or a killer of human beings, he’s a predator, and in that sense, Edward Cullen is not fundamentally different from the serial killer narrator of Darkly Dreaming Dexter or that other sexy beast, Ted Bundy.

Edward feels a constant, physical lust to take Bella’s life, to make that red blood flow, and much of the tension in the novel comes from his resisting his desire to rip her throat out. They cuddle together (chastely, for Mayer is a good Mormon gal), in a scene that has Bella literally courting death as she initiates a kiss.

Over and over, in ways both literal and figurative, Bella places herself into danger so that Edward can save her, even (in a later novel) cliff-diving into rushing waters that drag her to near-death so that the experience will allow her to ”hear” Edward’s voice in her head. Bottom line, Bella feels cannot live without Edward, so she wants to die in order to be with him forever.

Already a blank page, Bella experiences a masochistic desire for self-erasure which is deeply disturbing, the more so because Mayer accepts this death-drive at face value and presents it uncritically…even romantically. Unable to have sex with Edward as a mortal, the only way Bella can truly experience intimacy with him is through her own death, through the erasure of her mortal self and the assumption of his own (and vastly superior) identity. Meyer never questions this potentially painful issue to any length, never asking herself (or having Bella ask herself) what that would really mean, to give up her home, her father and her mother, her friends in Forks or Phoenix, or the pains and benefits of assuming an adult identity, being pregnant, giving birth, and watching one’s children grow up. Were this presented honestly or literally as a case of a teenager who’s attracted to a violent stalker and wants to become one of his victims, or were Bella a woman from a different race who wanted to give up her essential self in order to assume a white identity (very white, in this case), many people would justly be outraged. Peel off the vampire overlay, and what you have is misogyny.

That’s bad enough. The fact that Bella, with no ethical qualms whatsoever, wants to be a vampire herself is worse. Bella herself wants to be a killer. (This is fairly ridiculous, since the heroine literally faints at the sight of blood in biology class. Apparently, she’d wind up being the Karen Carpenter of the vampire world.) One fundamental difference, though, between Bella and a serial killer like Bundy or Dahmer or a fictional one like Dexter, is that serial killers are largely born that way. Bella, though, has a choice.

My conclusion? Twilight sucks."

I feel I must rip apart the rebuttal because the Anti-Twilight article is extremely well written and expresses all my opinions (there are more, I can't have just a few opinions) and while the argument is one of the few well written, well thought out arguments for Twilight, I like doing this sort of thing.

And here we go:

Paragraphs one and two:

I understand the person's wariness to believe the author's reading of all the books, and I know all these things were explained in the book, but they weren't explained well. I could sit here and explain how much I despise Math (Math suxs, why do we need it?) but unless my argument makes sense (In my future line of work, I won't be needing this sort of math. I'll be studying the human mind, and yes I'll need basic math, but why do I need to know the square root of pie if I'm trying to find out why this child is unhappy in his or her home?) it's pointless. If SMeyer were a better writer she might have been able to pull this off, but her amateurish writing and purple prose make it difficult to sort out the facts and story from the "Gawd Edward's hawt!!1!!one"

"...the only way they could survive..." Why move to a small town where people would notice that sort of thing? Why not live in a big city where a few kids skipping school wouldn't bother anyone a bit? They need to live someplace that doesn't have a lot of sunlight, you Twilight-Twits say? Alaska. 6 months of no light and they could pull a 30 Days of Night and be REAL vampires. The could wear hoodies and sleeves. A sunhat and a see through top that makes it seem like the shirt sparkles and not them. Avoid shorts and short skirts and say 'I have some nasty legs,' or 'I don't like them, that's all. I like jeans and long skirts.' Stay indoors during the day and tell people 'Oh I have the night shift at such and such a place and the only time I get to sleep is during the day. Sucks right?' That makes a lot more sense to me than moving to a small town where things are noticed.

"They constantly move to avoid humans finding out their secret." Again, big city. They could move to the other side of town and no one would be the wiser because it's a city. People don't give a damn unless you're family, and if someone in my family sparkled, I'd demand to have my name changed or enter the witness protection program.

Paragraph three:

Not thinking something through doesn't make someone stupid, no, but it does mean they aren't mature enough to make proper, life changing decisions. "Bella's character follows her heart and does what she thinks is best." Bella's character? What character? She's flatter than a quarter. She's pukes at the sight of blood, is clumsy as an ox, is masochistic and is pretty. That's her character. Less than a paragraph and I just hit the nail on the head. That's sad.

She doesn't use her proper judgement to make decisions. Honestly, what individual in their right mind would leave their family, friends and everything they knew (unless everything they knew is abuse and hate, that I could understand) to be with a guy they'd known less than a full semester of high school? But they're in love! No. They aren't. She's infatuated with what she thinks he is and what she thinks he could be and he thinks she smells yummy. That's not love. That's sick.

"But she is a teenage girl. That’s just the way her character is. I don’t understand how that makes the story “suck”." They're making the assumption all teenage girls make bad decsions. We do not. I am a teenage girl and if some hot guy I'd been dating came up to me and said "Hey baby, let's run away together." I'd punch him in the face and hopefully break it. That's besically what Bella wants Edward to say. He's just too damn old fashioned.

That in of itself doesn't make the story suck. What makes the story suck is thst SMeyer can't write. What makes the story suck is that the characters are all sterotypical Mary-Sues/Gary Stus. What makes the story suck is that it's unrealistic. Yes, it's fiction, fantasy even, (thank you Snagglepuss) but even so it needs a sense of realism for it to be good. Harry Potter for instance. It was good because kids could think, and use their ever weakening imaginations. "My water bottle could be a portkey?! That old house could be another entrance to the Ministry of Magic? Wow!" Not: "My neighbors don't like sunlight *gasp* they must be vampires!"

Clearly: not the same.

Paragraph 4: My favorite.

"Stephenie Meyer’s story is just that. It’s a STORY. Don’t pick it apart and flip things around to make them seem like something they’re not. It only shows that you didn’t read very carefully. It’s fiction. Like the books (or not) for what they are, and leave it at that."

All books, whether they be biographies, fantasy or otherwise, are stories. Some are instructional and how-to books, but most of them are stories. I don't see people saying "Don't take Night seriously. It's just a story." It's a real life account of the Halocaust and the hell the author and his Dad went through to survive it.

Twilight, yes, is a story, and yes, is fiction, but it's badly written. Twilight is not a book with layers. It is not something difficlut to pick apart, and it is not something you have to read carefully. It is garbage. Pure and simple. Bad characters, a predictable plot (I knew Bella was gonna get pregant, and I knew Renesme was just a scapegoat for Jacob's happiness) horrible writing and the rape of vampire lore all lumped together with Stephanie Meyer's mind and desires to create trash.

You can't just leave stories and books alone. If a piece is fiction, fine, but it has to make sense, it just can't be utter crap. Even if it's a fantasy world like Middle Earth, or our world with a little color like London and the Leaky Cauldron fantasy and fiction all has to have a bottom line in fact of some kind. For Tolkien it was: how would humans (and other creatures) live in this kind of world for however many years. For J.K. Rowling: what if not everything was as it seemed, and there's actually an entire world of magic we humans don't know about. For Smeyer: My sexual fantasy with glittering vampires and no research at all.

Bottom line: Twilight is crap, there are no two ways around it. It isn't crap because vampires aren't real, or because I'm Christian and automatically I think stuff with vampires is satanic. I don't. I love vampires and fantasy world's, I love the idea of vampire's trying to fit into a -supposedly- human dominanted society, and I don't think God minds all that much. Twilight isn't bad because it's a bad idea, because it's not. The premise of Twilight is excellent, creative, but could be so much more if SMeyer had just looked into writing a bit more, figured out a less predictable plot line, fleshed out her characters until they were living and breathing, and put her own fantasies aside in places.

Thank you for your time. For further, more detailed, reading please wait until my essay "Twilight: Unreadable Garbage" is released in several weeks. I'm going into my opposing view research in a few days. I still have an outline to flesh out.

I was watching his show Mindfreak on A&E AND I've been waiting for this moment for days since I heard about it.

He told me to just close my eyes and imagine baloons lifting me. he told me to feel lighter than air, and as he said everything, I felt like their were strings attached to my shoulders and arms and I LEVITATED ABOUT AN INCH OFF THE FLOOR. Now, I'll be honest, I was nervous and part of me was elsewhere so only my heels went up, but I WASN'T HOLDING MYSELF UP WITH MY TOES, THEY WERE JUST REMINDING ME I'M STILL ON EARTH. I actually TIPPED FORWARD SO MUCH THAT I wouldn't have been able to hold myself up, no matter what. Criss Angel MINDFREAKED ME THROUGH THE TELEVISION.

OH MY GOD I'M SHAKING!!!!!!!

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!

I started college yesterday.

IMMA DIE.

I already have homework in every single class, I got lost twice (yet still wasn't late, hot damn) and I've realized my math teacher (an Italian man who's name isn't pronounceable) is the only one capable of losing me using WORDS. As if I didn't have enough issues with math... My body aches all over and I'm so tired I can't hold my head up because I was stupid and signed up for a class at 10:00 at night. STUPID. But a funny teacher, so it's worth it...

Overall though, I really liked it, I saw a friend from my trip to Ireland and there are eight cute boys per classroom.

Well, I have to start on that homework, later.

IMMA DIE.

~Dally